By the second season, the show became more serialized and abandoned the self-contained episode format of the first season. When the show first premiered, creator Earl Hamner, Jr. stated that he did not want the show to become another soap opera like Dallas (1978), however, by its second season, that is exactly what the show became.

A staunch Catholic, Jane Wyman scrapped a proposed lesbian storyline that was to involve Jane Badler's character Meredith Braxton and the character of Erin Jones. Meredith and Erin were re-written to be sisters instead.

Long before the show started, Jane Wyman had known Lorenzo Lamas since he was a baby, as she was friends with his family and with his parents, Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl. His father worked with her on Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre (1955).

At the beginning of the ninth season of this show, despite health problems, Jane Wyman was allegedly so displeased with the direction in which the writers and new producers were taking the show that she refused to play the scenes. She asked that they release her from her contract, but the producers refused. A compromise was reached in which they wrote her character out as being in a coma. At the end of the series, when it was determined that CBS was cancelling it, Wyman returned for the final three episodes.

Falcon Crest was located in the fictitious Tuscany Valley, which was the Napa Valley in Northern California. The series was filmed at the Spring Mountain Winery in St. Helena.